Transcription
When I talk about awakening, it sure seems like an event that happens at a certain point in time. And when you have a shift in identity, uh it's can be rather remarkable uh experientially. But the insight itself is not about experience. The insight is about identity.
But the perception that it is one moment in time that this shift occurs or we wake up uh is really just the way our mind has to understand it. Put it in a box because the mind can only think in terms of time, space, separation. Uh but a lot of what uh sets this up, what leads to this shift is not necessarily what we don't see but what we don't relate to uh awakening perhaps until realization matures. And that is the unsatisfactoriness that leads us to inquire, leads us to surrender or sometimes just leads to uh some major disruption in our experience of identity, our experience of time and space and so forth. Uh that those causes and conditions that precede awakening are often there for years, many years.
For me, as long as I can remember being someone uh self as long as I could remember self-reflecting, I remembered it being uncomfortable. I remembered self-reflection being uncomfortable as soon as I noticed it was happening at some level. Uh so one of the reasons I'm explaining it this way or laying it out this way is that we can get into this way of thinking about awakening where it seems like such a um such a tremendous goal or to to get to that point in time. But I want to point out that you're already there. The the causes and conditions are already in play. your head is already in the tiger's mouth, so to speak. Um, and so the path is the unsatisfactoriness.
Actually, when I was growing up, I was pretty miserable. um to call what was causing that misery a word, I would call it suffering or um self-consciousness of a certain variety. And it was not funny. When I was going out, it was pretty pretty brutal. And it got worse. It just got more and more intense. But in retrospect, it's the best thing that ever happened to me. the grittiness of that texture of selfreflection and the discomfort of it, self-consciousness, self-doubt, which always comes with self-consciousness, or at least it always did for me. And as I work with people waking up themselves, I see a pretty heavy weight of self-doubt, especially before a shift in identity and then even for some time afterward. So it's a heavy burden uh experientially but it's also what is focusing us in to confront the identity structure itself or the let's say the false identity structure. So there is sacredness in suffering. There's sacredness in the unsatisfactoriness, the discomfort of thought, self-reflection and so forth. You could say there's an intelligence in it.
So then the question comes down to how do we utilize that portal of suffering? How do we utilize that catalyst to investigate our own identity, the nature of identity? or perhaps just how do we look deeper into the suff suffering mechanism itself? That's what we're called to investigate, which is my favorite thing. It's like my favorite thing to do uh is to look into that with people. And it's really fascinating because there are some very consistent aspects to how that has to happen in a way u mechanistically I suppose at the same time I see all these beautiful faces in the room and I know it's specific to each one as well there's something individual about everyone's path so to speak that is really beautiful uh pointing and personal in the conventional sense of the word personal. Uh this may be one of the harder things to get across early on to people. Uh that it is really a personal journey. Uh but now when I'm using the word journey I mean as we really start to drop in to that inquiry to that surrender in a sense you have to go to the most personal place the place you've been overlooking you might be able to call it the sense of I am something like that but um that's the trick in a way that's the one of the keys is to help an individual or help people um recognize that they've actually been looking past it for years.
There's something about the way we identify with thought that we focus beyond ourself in a way. Um, or maybe I could say we're we're focusing on a thought object or or multiple thought objects. You know, the images in the mind ongoing, the narratives in the mind ongoing, the doubts, the seeking, the seeking, the seeking, the clinging, um looking for relief, the distractions, all of that and in every sense of who I am in relation to the past and future, all of it, those are all objects of thought. And We can live an entire lifetime transfixed on those objects of thought, never really stepping back into the sense of pure being, pure eye sense. I might say unbound consciousness. But any of those words I just said can also become objects of thought very easily and they will at first. So that that happened to me. Uh you know I'd heard about enlightenment. I'd heard about all these terms learning about Buddhism in various ways when I was younger and they rema all those terms for me remained thought objects for some time. I was still bound into that subject object construct and thought that was very rigid. So, I didn't really know what was actually being pointed to. And some people who use those terms are also just they're just thought objects to that person as well. Um, but to some they're not. To some, they can use the word I am and they can point you directly to what that actually means. But it isn't a thought object that's being pointed to. That's that's what I'm saying is the whole key to that first shift. that first shift out of the false identity of past, present, future, self, and other problems and solutions. Uh the Zen, one of the Zen ways of saying it would be taking the backward step. And it's a it's a radically simple act. It's a radically simple act to reclaim that which you've been looking past for many many years and using the lens of thought to do it. It's it's a bit of a cosmic joke. It's so simple that it it seems hard. Uh and yet it's always there. It's always there. It's always right where you are. It's what's looking through those eyes. It's what's perceiving every single thought. But itself is not the thought, not defined by anything. It's so clear in a way like looking through a prism or looking through a piece of glass, so to speak. It's so clear that it sort of finds itself as whatever it's experiencing. But when it's set up in that standing wave of thought, what it's experiencing itself as is something extremely limited because thought is very limited because it's it's a reflective apparatus. So you're at least I was living in a a world of inner reflection. It was miserable because it was tight, small, felt constricted, felt scripted, it felt uh stereotyped somehow.
Also, there's a lot of social uh endorsement of it. A lot of the ways we use language because language and thought are very very very closely related if not the same thing. But the way we use language all day long does actually reinforce this perception of separation, perception of time, perception of problems, perception uh that I need to continue to seek the solution to the problems. So there's a reasonably strong social endorsement for that inner inner thought process. So it almost becomes an externalized inner thought process which we share among other humans and then we externalize it to media. Yeah. There's a reason that dopamine scrolling is like it is. It's addictive in the way thoughts are addictive. And yet with all of that going on, seeming complexity of all of that, the truth of what you are, that pure being sense, never went anywhere. It's just here, always. Um Tony, I heard Tony Parsons say something once I really liked. He said, "Your true nature sits on your shoulder and watches you look around trying to find your true nature." It's pretty that's a pretty good way of saying it.
So, what is your true nature? What is the most fundamental experience of you? What is the most fundamental experience of you before you even learned you were a you before you started adding concepts to what this experience is, which may not even be a particularly personal experience. Many people have a a basic experience. It's not particularly personal. Doesn't particularly feel like an eye, some do. Uh but even that is still a very subtle inflection of mind. So there's something right there. I want to I almost want to like locate it. It's between your ears. It's at the center of what you're experiencing. But um but it but it itself has no center, no beginning, no end, no birth, no death. So awakening really is not the beginning of something and it's definitely not something new. So then what is it? What changes? It's not even that something goes away really. I could say an illusion gets dispelled or at least the beginning the beginning of the process of dispelling an illusion opens happens. Um, but even then it's not really as if anything actually goes away because there was never anything actually there.
So there's something instinctual about this. This is what I was talking about in the opening talk last night. I I used the word gravity. There's something instinctual about this whole unbinding And I find that more that realization matures in a given individual, the more they align with that intuition naturally. And ironically, it took me many years to be able to recognize the nature of what actually happened when I was 24. like that shift then the series of shifts that happened um I knew it it was obvious is as obvious as the sun when I'm looking right at it but the mechanistic nature of it in relation to thought and personality and all of that I wouldn't have been able to elucidate it but I can now for the most part and it comes down to a certain alignment with your instinct with your instinct but if you've been for many years like I was um being transfixed with thought and in that standing wave of identification uh that habits very strong then it's easy to your instinct is there the whole time but it's easy to overlook it with the next thought. It's easy to doubt it again and again and again. Um, but the beautiful thing about this whole deal is that the instinct doesn't require effort. Your instinct doesn't require effort. It's just there. Just like the guided meditation this morning. Experience is just here. Presence is just here. It doesn't need to be found or attuned to. So all the ideas of finding attuning to clarifying these are thoughts right. Uh so there can be momentum to thought to try to sort of carry us away in a sense but even that doesn't happen. Maybe it's more like distraction and yet that instinct is right there.
So what what I think we actually get better at is Recognizing that we can continue to attune to the instinct um in more and more situations, trust it fully and let go of the tendency to run back to thought, the tendency to run back to doubt, the tendency to run back to the over the structured overlay of reality that we've been using as a coping mechanism in our own mind that actually everything takes care of itself. It gets so singular that as Dogen describes it as u total exertion. One footstep is the entire universe. One footstep is all of everything that could ever possibly exist. There's nothing outside of that. Nothing stepped into that footstep and nothing steps out of it. It's just footstep. It's just breath completion in one u timeless moment of experience of sound of color. So we learn to let go in a radical way to let go of the need to reorient to thought to reorient to some kind of false identity to reorient to our even maybe chronic tendency to dissociate in various ways. And and we see at some point that's just a tendency. It's just a it's like a sense of an urge to not be here, to be back there, run away into our inner world or to just distractly with various substances and non-substance substances, activities, that simple urge to move away from our own instinct. uh and and at this level our own instinct and and the nature of non-dualistic presence aren't too it's all the same. It's complete right here right now. Um, but that tendency just gets kind of weaker and weaker as we trust more and more the complete immersion, complete dissolution and complete intimacy of this. It's like a little bit of a death and rebirth every moment. So the problem of birth and death is solved in seeing that they're just inter interdependent um aspects of presence of this.
So, a few things about instinct that in the way I'm talking about it, just to be clear, it's not anything you can think about. It's not what you think it is by definition. So, you're off the hook in having to figure it out. There's nothing to figure out. You're off the hook in having to try to define it because a definition will be a thought. That's not what I'm talking about. You're off the hook in having to try to as far as try having to try to figure out what doctrine or dogma relates to what I'm talking about. Right? That happens a good amount. People who know a lot about doctrine of various types will be like, "Oh, are you talking about this or that?" Like, "No, I don't want to give you another thought. You know, I don't want to add ahead to the one you already have, so to speak. It's more of a feel probably. And the portal is mystery. As I was talking about last night, the the portal to being able to really engage your instinct is being able to really feel the mysterious nature of this, the wonder, the awe. Perhaps this is why nature often is a profound catalyst for this kind of thing for people. Nature pretty quickly brings the experience of awe usually once we're really seeing what's there, feeling what's there, smelling what's there.